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"A human being should be able to change a
diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a
building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone,
comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,
solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Friday, 23 August 2013

Some time ago, while looking for some Linux related
new on the 'net, I read this review
about a Linux distribution I never heard before: Deepin.

Deepin is a Linux Distribution, based on Ubuntu,
originally created for the Chinese users pool but also available in
English language. Apart from positive reviews what really interested
me has been the fact Deepin comes with its own desktop environment
(Deepin DE) based on Gnome Shell.

I so decided to test how it works on the EEEPC.

First impressions

I prepared a bootable USB disk with Deepin with the
usual process: download the ISO image from Deepin download
page then write to the flash disk using Unetbootin.

Here is how Deepin looks like just after boot:

I must say Deepin default theme and wallpaper appear
aesthetically well refined. This means nothing on the long run but
might be dramatically important to give a good first impression to
new users.

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

In my previous
post I moved my first steps with Mercurial DVCS, now I'll install
a Mercurial server implementation and configure both my computers to
access it using SSH protocol.

Mercurial-server

With DVCS you don't have to use a central
server, repositories could be shared over LAN using shared folders,
but this doesn't mean you can't have one. Various
mercurial server side implementations exists, using different
protocols. May be I'm too server-client minded but I didn't
feel satisfied by just sharing repositories over a shared folder so I
decided to install Mercurial-server.

Installing Mercurial-server is an easy task the
command

sudo apt-get install mercurial-server

complete the installation process and the creation
of the application user (hg). A bit more complex is configuring SSH
for accessing the server, I mainly followed instructions from here
and from Mercurial-server documentation.

Mercurial-server uses public-key authentication and
SSH-Agent in order to grant access to its clients, so the first step
has been to generate a keys couple for SSH. The ssh-keygen command
does this interactively.

maxx@VeritonS661:~$ ssh-keygen -t dsa

Generating public/private dsa key pair.

Enter file in which to save the key
(/home/maxx/.ssh/id_dsa):

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):

Enter same passphrase again:

Your identification has been saved in
/home/maxx/.ssh/id_dsa.

Your public key has been saved in
/home/maxx/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.

I then copied the public key in mercurial-server
keys configuration path and told mercurial-server to refresh its
authentication files, using the following commands:

ssh-add -L > maxx.key

sudo mkdir /etc/mercurial-server/keys/root/maxx

sudo cp maxx.key /etc/mercurial-server/keys/root/maxx
/veritons661

sudo -u hg /usr/share/mercurial-server/refresh-auth

the usual path for mercurial-server keys is (for
root users)

/etc/mercurial-server/keys/root/<user-name>

but if the same user must be accessed from different
machines a different path is used:

/etc/mercurial-server/keys/root/<user-name>/<machine-name>

since I was going to add the maxx user from
the EEEPC too I had to use, of course, the second from. On the EEEPC
side I generated SSH keys at the same manner then, after logging to
the desktop computer (the server) with: